Search form

Energy

[powr-countdown-timer id=48f846bf_1463098027]
When refineries go down, gasoline prices go up. That's why we started the clock on the next "unplanned" refinery outage: the Golden State Gouge-ometer. You can enter a contest to guess how long refiners can make it between outages this year.

Consumer Watchdog, the publisher of Capitol Watchdog, has launched the first searchable website with hundreds of thousands of emails and other files uncovered from corruption scandals at the California Public Utilities Commission.

www.PUCpapers.org allows the public, journalists, advocates, litigators, students and policymakers to search and uncover evidence about inappropriate relationships between regulated utilities, their regulators, their investors, and public officials.

At 9:30 AM on Tuesday the California Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee will examine whether So Cal Gas and state energy regulators rigged a report claiming there would be blackouts in LA if Aliso Canyon's natural gas storage stays off line.

The hearings have the potential to pull the curtain back on who really wrote the report (So Cal Gas?) and whether the public was misled.

A study by the Rand Institute puts in perspective the need for new oil refinery regulations that the oil industry has long resisted. The Rand pegs the year-plus Exxon Torrance refinery outage as the most expensive in California history, costing consumers an extra $2.4 billion at the pump in the first 6 months alone and taking a $6.9 billion bite out of the state economy.

As the sun rises in the Earth Day sky toward high noon, the California Energy Commission in Sacramento will be ground zero for the debate on what to do about the highest gasoline prices in the nation, which California has endured all year due to record profits by California oil refiners.